What to Want

How do we decide what to want? This is an important question for everyone, but it is particularly important for those who, like many of us, have a great deal of choice. Having a lot of choice does feel a bit like freedom, but it can have its burdens. In an article for Psychology Today entitled, “We Want Freedom, but Can We Handle it?“  Cynthia Vejar writes about the burden of choice: having many options can reduce happiness and increase stress. She writes, “Freedom can be thrilling, but it can also feel overwhelming and confusing”. Dr Vejar goes on to describe various ways to use structure to manage the stress of choice-making, in the hopes of being able to make good choices without too much trouble.

René Girard is a French philosopher who believes that what we want is imitative (he calls it mimetic desire): we look to others to model for us what we ourselves should want. Girard’s theory is demonstrated in modern social media. “Influencers”, people whose role on social media is to model things for the purpose of persuading others to want them, exist in the hope that they’ll persuade others to want the things. And it works. People don’t know what to want, they look around to see (often on social media) what others (the influencers) seem to want, so they decide they want the same thing as that person. Yes, they’re being manipulated for someone else’s profit.

Jesus has a completely different take on wanting. For Jesus, it is not what he himself wants that matters, but the will of the Father. In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prays, “Father, … not what I want, but what you want.” [Mark 14:36]  When he teaches his disciples to pray, Jesus teaches them to say to the Father, “your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” [Matthew 6:10]  For Jesus, there does not need to be an overwhelming burden of figuring out what to want, and there is no question about which influencer to imitate. God is the one to follow, and ours is to want what he wants.

One of the challenges with Jesus’ way of wanting is that wanting what God wants can be difficult if we decide that we want something different. This is why Jesus tells his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” [Matthew 16:24] To follow Jesus, we need to deny ourselves. That means that we deliberately choose not to go after what we want. We follow Jesus instead.

But what does following Jesus look like? Jesus denies himself, takes up his cross, quite literally, and follows the will of God the Father, all the way to his own death and resurrection. Jesus shows us that the way to resurrection and new life is to want God so much that we are willing to give up wanting other things, things for ourselves.

If we think about it, is that so bad? As we saw, wanting in a world of many choices can be a burden. And there is the mimetic desire temptation: looking at others and imitating their wants, for no reason in particular except that we don’t know what we ourselves should want. This leaves us open to manipulation. Is it not better to look at Jesus instead? Jesus shows us that God wants our good, so much so that he puts himself on the line for us. We can trust God. So why not let go of wanting things for ourselves, and imitate Jesus instead, by deciding to want what God wants?